From screen to zine: Meet the makers using Figma for digital DIY

Though it was designed in Figma and published last June, Dance Data’s Underground Fanzine feels like a callback to ’90s zine culture. Product designer Jesse Pimenta and producer-writer Cheyce Batchelor—partners in love and zines—produced the 97-page publication from their Brooklyn apartment. An offshoot of Jesse’s record label, Dance Data, it captures the spirit of America’s underground music scene through features and interviews with artists, producers, and “the influential party crews pulling the strings.” (Jesse and Cheyce are no strangers to raving themselves—in fact, they met at the storied Brooklyn venue Nowadays.)

Figma’s own Asian-American and Pacific Islander employee resource group used the platform to design AZINE (from “AZN” and “zine”), which you can read in the Figma Community.

Jesse and Cheyce aren’t the only ones using Figma to craft what was once considered an analog art. Designer Dominique Saiegh, for example, creates art and packaging for cassettes and CDs. Designer Sebastián Ortega produces promotional and brand assets for his online radio station, SutroFM. And Tara Ridgedell and Gonzalo Guerrero have run remote workshops in Figma under the banner of their print studio, Secret Riso Club. As champions of their communities, they’re all part of a growing wave of creatives using digital tools for real-world connection.

Designing a ’90s-inspired zine

Projects like the Dance Data Underground Fanzine are rooted in the history of zines, which have long been a hallmark publication for fringe communities and subcultures. Their scrappy, Xeroxed style became synonymous with 1970s punk culture, when photocopiers and inexpensive cut-and-paste tactics allowed artists and activists to share ideas outside of mainstream publishing. For Jesse and Cheyce, it was important that the zine harken back to this handmade ethos, and allow fans to have a physical artifact of an otherwise dispersed, ephemeral music scene, where parties and crews come and go.

The couple produced the Underground Fanzine in just three months—a feat Jesse credits to Figma’s flexibility and lightweight interface. As a product designer at Catalog, Jesse found Figma to be his obvious tool of choice. The canvas gave him a quick, bird’s-eye-view of the work, and Auto layout made it easy to organize, allowing him to “reorder things without a lot of mental bandwidth,” he says. The speed of the tool was also key for his extremely iterative process: “Every page was basically its own experience. I wanted each crew’s interview to feel completely different from the last.”

Jesse, who cut his teeth as an intern at Obey, has always been inspired by print archives. To guide the zine’s visual direction, he drew inspiration from the rave flyers, computer newsletters, and tech magazines he remembers poring over in Archive.org’s The Magazine Rack during the earlier days of his career. “There was this boundary-breaking, hacker energy in a cool, cyberpunk way,” he says. “People thought they were going to take over the world on 80-kilobyte graphic cards.”

To capture this energy, Jesse leaned heavily on Figma’s plugin ecosystem. Noise & Texture gave each spread a gritty, speckled effect reminiscent of ’90s photocopies, and Photopea allowed him to manipulate images with filters like noise and threshold effects. Another favorite was Skew Skew, which he used to morph type into unconventional shapes, almost as though warped on a Xerox machine. Taken all together and paired with retro rave flyers and old-school clipart, the end result is in conversation with zines from earlier eras.

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Sample pages from the Dance Data Underground Fanzine

Jesse also tapped into the hacker mindset to prepare the zine for print production. To ensure the images were print quality, he needed to export individual pages at 4X their individual size, convert them into print-ready PDFs, and then resize the final document. But with thousands of tiny assets, exporting it took longer than ideal. He already has a workaround in mind for the future: “Instead of starting my frames at the actual print size, I would need them 4X smaller.” That way, when he exports them, they’ll be the appropriate print size—it’s a testament to experimentation, and a useful tip to other zinesters.

Add noise, texture, gradients, and other effects to selected layers with the Noise & Texture plugin.

Makership in the music scene

There’s no shortage of creators using Figma in underground music. Berlin-based graphic designer Dominique Saiegh, Jesse’s friend and former colleague, designs posters and album artwork for artists and music labels. When working on CD and cassette tape sleeves, it’s particularly important to have a connection to the physicality and materiality of the product. In the file, she layers scanned textures and images of CDs and their plastic cases over her designs, “tearing things apart as you could with a physical product in your hand,” she says. For example, she’s able to see how typography might feel behind a plastic casing, giving the design a more tactile presence. “The ability to work with typography, vector, and image in a mockup with great speed and precision is important for my iterative process of exploring all possible combinations,” says Dominique.

In San Francisco, product designer Sebastián Ortega, another friend of Jesse, uses Figma to create everything from custom iconography, to weekly show flyers, to social media posts for his online radio station Sutro FM. The platform allows him to iterate on templates that make use of the station’s distinctive visual identity and typographic treatments while swapping in images to represent different artists or DJs. Like Jesse, he leverages noise plugins to add texture to assets, and credits Figma with helping him streamline the process as a one-person operation. It’s a labor of love meant to promote a sense of community outside of shows, clubs, and parties. “Online radio creates a space to be together without thinking about money and other limitations,” he says.

Running a remote risograph workshop

For Gonzalo Guerrero and Tara Ridgedell, who run the Brooklyn storefront and print studio Secret Riso Club, Figma enabled community events even when the pandemic made real-life gatherings impossible. “It was so nice to be able to mimic that group collaboration online,” says Tara. Participants met in a Figma file for a risograph printing workshop. Each group came together in a dedicated frame where they contributed a textual or visual element to a poster. They then divided the design into different layers, separated by color, mimicking the physical process of risograph printing, in which colors are layered as paper passes through the machine. By structuring the process this way, Tara and Gonzalo demonstrated how to prepare digital files in a print-friendly format. After the workshop, they printed the posters and mailed them to participants as an artifact of their work.

Staying connected to community

Whether they’re producing zines, album art, online radio, or risograph prints, these creators ground their work in a DIY ethos that celebrates the freedom of self-expression and the joy of shared experience. At a time when online spaces can feel overwhelming or anonymous—and design can feel divorced from the maker—there’s value in creating something personalized and handmade. Cheyce points out that social media and legacy music publications, diluted by paid ads and algorithms, can feel disconnected from the communities they claim to represent. Jesse agrees, adding that streaming platforms have turned many into passive consumers of music, not active participants. When they published the Underground Fanzine, the response was enthusiastic. “It gave me hope in the sense that people still love getting their hands on a good read, no matter how glued to our screens we might be,” says Jesse.

Want to try your own hand at creating a zine in Figma? Check out the Zine Maker or Mini Booklet Template.